Victor Emmanuel, he was tiny, timid, and indecisive. In twenty-two years as monarch, he had received the credentials of no fewer than twenty prime ministers. Mainstream political leaders quarreled incessantly among themselves but made almost no effort to communicate with the public at large. The times were ripe for a real leader, a duce, who could bring Italy together and make it once again the center of the world.
IN MILAN ON A RAINY SUNDAY MORNING, MARCH 23, 1919, A FEW dozen angry men crowded into a muggy meeting room of the Industrial and Commercial Alliance in Piazza San Sepolcro. After hours of talk, they stood, clasped hands, and pledged their readiness “to kill or die” in defense of Italy against all enemies. To dramatize their unity, they chose for their emblem the fasces, a bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax that in ancient times had represented the power wielded by a Roman consul. The manifesto they signed bore just fifty-four names, and their foray into electoral politics that autumn was barely noticed, but within a couple of years the Fascist movement had more than two thousand chapters, and Benito Mussolini was their leader.
The Fascists grew because millions of Italians hated what they were seeing in their country and were afraid of what the world was witnessing in Bolshevik Russia. In speech after speech, Mussolini offered an alternative. He urged his countrymen to reject the capitalists who wanted to exploit them, the Socialists who were bent on disrupting their lives, and the crooked and spineless politicians who talked and talked while their beloved homeland sank further into the abyss. Instead of pitting class against class, he proposed that Italians unite—workers, students, soldiers, and businesspeople—and form a common front against the world. He asked his supporters to contemplate a future in which those who belonged to his movement would always look out for one another, while the parasites who had been holding the country back—the foreign, the weak, the politically unreliable—would be left to fend for themselves. He called on his followers to believe in an Italy that would be prosperous because it was self-sufficient, and respected because it was feared. This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.
When the new decade arrived, the Socialists still enjoyed the most favorable position in parliament and had a substantial presence throughout the country. To counter them, the Fascists drew on the vast pool of jobless veterans to organize their own squads of armed men, Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Leagues), to shoot labor leaders, trash newspaper offices, and beat up workers and peasants. The gangs thrived because many in the police viewed them sympathetically and pretended not to be aware of the mayhem they were inflicting on leftist foes. Within months the Fascists were driving the Socialists out of cities and towns, especially in Italy’s northern provinces. To advertise their identity, they wore makeshift uniforms—a black shirt, green-gray pants, and a dark fez-like cap with tassel. The Socialists had them outnumbered, but the Fascists were gaining quickly and were even more ruthless in applying force.
Mussolini had no playbook from which to guide this burgeoning insurrection. He was the undisputed leader of a movement whose direction was not yet defined. The Fascists had developed long lists of goals, but they possessed no single bible or manifesto. To some of its enthusiasts, the fledgling party was a way to rescue capitalism and Roman Catholicism from the Leninist hordes; to others it meant defending tradition and the monarchy. For many it was a chance to bring glory back to Italy; and to quite a few it meant a paycheck and a green light to bash heads.
Mussolini’s own course was marked by zigs and zags. He took money from big corporations and banks, but he spoke the language of veterans and workers. He tried several times to patch relations with the Socialists, only to discover that his former colleagues didn’t trust him and the more extreme Fascists were furious at the attempt. As the political environment continued to worsen, he had to become ever more militant just to keep pace with the forces he purported to command. Asked by a reporter to summarize his program, Mussolini replied, “It is to break the bones of the democrats … and the sooner the better.” In October 1922, he decided to challenge the government directly by mobilizing Fascists from around the country. “Either we are allowed to govern,” he exclaimed to the party conference, “or we will seize power by marching on Rome.”
Given that centrist politicians were divided to the point of paralysis, the responsibility for countering Mussolini’s bold move rested on the narrow shoulders of King Victor Emmanuel. He had to choose between the Socialists who wanted to destroy the monarchy and the roughneck Fascists who might, he hoped, still prove malleable; the middle ground had collapsed. The army and the prime minister advised the king to block the Fascists’ proposed march, arrest Mussolini, and deal with the Socialists separately. The king refused at first, but changed his mind when Fascists began to occupy media sites and government buildings. At 2 a.m. on October 28, he ordered that the Fascists be stopped. Seven hours later, he reversed course again, apparently believing the Fascists could defeat the army, which at that point was almost certainly untrue.
With the military ordered to stand down and tens of thousands of Blackshirts gathering on the edge of the capital, Victor chose what he thought was the safest path. He sent a cable to Mussolini, who was waiting warily in Milan, asking him to Rome to replace the prime minister, who had lost his majority and was serving in the capacity of caretaker. So it was that Mussolini’s gamble paid off. In the space of a weekend, he leapt to the top of the political ladder, and achieved his aim without winning an election or violating the constitution.
On October 31, the five-hour March on Rome took place more as a celebratory parade than the putsch it signified. The event attracted a mixed group and defied any narrow stereotype about what a Fascist should look like or be. Among the marchers were fishermen from Naples striding alongside clerks and shopkeepers while wearing dark jerseys and pilot caps. Farmers from Tuscany wore hunting jackets. A sixteen-year-old high school student, Giovanni Ruzzini, lacked money to buy a new shirt and so dyed an old one black; he also salvaged a military helmet from the local dump. A fair number of those present were barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes. One man brought along fifty hammer-and-sickle badges, taken, he insisted, from the bodies of dead Communists. The contingent from Grosseto was led by an eighty-year-old blind man who, a half century earlier, had stood with Italy’s greatest general, Garibaldi. Members of the boisterous crowd came equipped with antique muskets, pistols, old safari guns, golf clubs, scythes, table legs, daggers; one man carried an ox’s jawbone, and others lugged potentially lethal hunks of dried salt cod. Most walked, but a wealthy young man from Ascoli Piceno drove up with a machine gun mounted on his Fiat. From Foggia came fifty cavalrymen perched on plow horses. Among those welcoming Fascism and shouting “Viva Mussolini” that day were two hundred Jews.
Despite the impressive spectacle, the party’s political footing was not yet firm. Mussolini’s swift rise had left him vulnerable to an equally rapid fall. The parliament was still dominated by Socialists and liberals, and the conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace. But Mussolini, soon to be known as Il Duce, had a talent for theater and little respect for the courage of his adversaries. Two weeks after taking office, he made his first address to the legislature. He began by striding into the hall and raising his arm in a Roman salute.fn2 Silently, he scanned the edges of the room, where well-muscled security guards from his own party were lined up on benches, fondling their daggers. Hands on his hips, Mussolini declared, “I could have turned this drab grey hall into a bivouac for my Blackshirts and made an end of parliament. It was in my power to do so, but it was not my wish—at least not yet.”
With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water
